Resistance Writers Tour

The lack of transgender and gender-nonconforming visibility in the publication world at large can be disheartening. There are loads of talented writers and poets that break down barriers with their writing daily. The Women Your Mother Warned You About: Resistance Tour is a travelling group of some genre-defining voices and authors. The group comes together to showcase transgender women and AMAB (Assigned Male at Birth) nonbinary writers with the second stop of the 2017 Heartspark Press Great Lakes Tour. Heartspark Press is a publishing collective that exclusives publishes and promotes stories, poems, collections, oral histories, and more from transgender women, non-binary, agender, and AMAB trans people. Their mission is to promote financial accessibility to the work with a Pay-What-You-Can model. One prominent reader on the tour includes Kokumo, a black poet, musician, and activist from Chicago who recently won a 2017 Transgender Poetry Lamba Literary Award for the collection Reacquainted With Life. The collection focuses on survival and resilience reimaging music such as Erykah Badu and Disney Villains like Ursula. Another featured reader is Tobi-Hill Meyer, who is a teacher, activist, and author of many texts focusing on trans lifestyle and sexuality. This lineup is packed with even more accomplished and exciting readers, and you can find more about them here. The venue will be wheelchair accessible and the speakers do ask audience members to be fragrance free. As always, respecting pronouns is appreciated and asking for pronouns is nice thing to do. Some of the writers use she/her pronouns, while others do not. Be respectful of the writers and space being created to give trans women and AMAB trans people a place to share their stories. —John McCracken